Category: words

HISTORY YOU CAN HOLD IN YOUR HANDS

As libraries become more and more electronic, they’ve been dumping some of their paper archives. “When the British Library decided to dump a historic archive of American newspapers, the best-selling novelist Nicholson Baker was so horrified he decided to buy it for himself. He is now engaged in a one-man campaign to rescue ‘the raw store of history’ that microfilm and the internet promise to destroy.” – The Telegraph (UK)

THE RIPPLES OF BIGNESS

Think consolidation of the publishing industry won’t affect what you read? “Science and technical journals have become a case study in the publishing industry’s growing consolidation. Until the 1960’s, scores of smaller companies and nonprofit organizations published the vast majority of journals. Since then, a handful of companies led by Reed Elsevier have acquired the bulk of them and have aggressively raised subscription prices. The average price of a subscription to a scholarly journal has more than tripled in the last 14 years. To keep up, libraries now buy fewer new books than they did a decade ago, diminishing the market for books of all kinds and frustrating professors desperate to publish.” – New York Times

THE NEW READING

“Hypertext literature is a wonderful subject for discourse, theory, and intellectual hobnobbing; but in the final analysis, there’s really not that much to it. Insofar as hypertext binds the Web together, it’s wonderful. Insofar as hypertext allows multimedia Web art to function, it’s great glue. Insofar as hypertext comprises a new literary genre, it’s about as riveting as those “write your own story” books that came out when I was a kid. – *spark-online

GILLER WINNERS

For the first time, Canada’s Giller prize has been awarded to two writers – “David Adams Richards and Michael Ondaatje both won the $25,000 Giller Prize. The judges, Margaret Atwood, Jane Urquhart and Alistair MacLeod, all senior deans of Canadian literature, huddled for just a few hours before announcing their decision.” – Ottawa Citizen

THE ‘OTHER’ ONLINE PUBLISHING

Negotiating book rights is “a time- and labor-consuming, long winded, costly and inefficient business; heavy manuscripts have to be expensively shipped often over long distances, and there is a huge amount of copying, and faxing and phoning at international rates, with often only a comparatively small reward. Why not, indeed, work it all out online: post catalogues, properties, partial manuscripts on the Web, e-mail pitch letters and offers, conduct auctions? – Publishers Weekly

TWO APPROACHES TO WRITING A LIFE STORY

  • Recent biographies of John Updike and Saul Bellow take two very different approaches to their subjects. James Atlas “meditates on Bellow’s controversial role as a public intellectual, maintaining a remarkable level of objectivity,” while “William H. Pritchard, on the other hand, shies away from the personal details of Updike’s life, openly deriding ‘talk show revelations and displays’. He argues that ‘such events pale in interest when put next to [Updike’s] writings, products of all those hours sitting at the desk with pencil or typewriter or computer’.” – Chronicle of Higher Education

READING HAITI

“Whatever its roots, Haiti’s extraordinary literature provides an occasion for this sad country to transcend its own instability, and discern possibilities beyond its current disasters. To tread a razor’s edge between poetry and disaster. To come to Haiti in search of its literature is to fall in love with the place–even if, sometimes, this passion is followed by a great deal of pain.” – Boston Review